bootloader

Post navigation

OnePlus One, the 2014 flagship killer, is truly an awesome phone. You can’t get a phone better than this in any respect at this price point. I am using this phone for a while now and I couldn’t find anything wrong with this phone that justifies the low price. CyanogenMod and OnePlus teams have put really a lot of effort to offer us an experience as close as possible to a Nexus. The phone also has a great developer community working constantly and bringing us new amazing ROMs. However, you might, sometimes, want to go back to the stock ROM CyanogenMod 11s, which itself is pretty nice. It offers a lot of customizability and very good and fluid performance. I am going to show the steps for restoring stock firmware on the 64GB OnePlus One.

Although it might seem like an unnecessary topic, but someone might want to revert back to Android 4.4.4 KitKat from Android 5.0 Lollipop. Several reasons come to mind – you might not like the material design, you might experience performance problems with the Lollipop or you might want to go back to the stock firmware of your region instead of using the GPE firmware or the Brazil firmware. No matter what, you might want to go back to KitKat. Follow the steps below to do that. Please be cautious that this might soft-brick your phone and the way to un-brick it is to flash the lollipop firmware again.

If you have a Motorola Moto G (2013) and still haven’t received the Android 5.0 OTA notification, you can manually upgrade your device to Android 5.0 Lollipop. This tutorial will exactly show you how to do that. I am trying to write this tutorial in such a way that both the single SIM version and the dual SIM version of Moto G can be upgraded.

Moto G is one of the most widely appreciated phone of 2013. With this phone, Motorola has showed that you don’t have to spend a premium to get a very acceptable smartphone experience. What’s even more amazing is the developer support behind this device. The XDA Forum for Moto G is very active and there are tons of custom ROMs and custom kernels available for this tiny beast. However, you would need to unlock your bootloader first to taste those different ROMs and kernels. In this tutorial, I will list the steps for unlocking the bootloader of your MOTO G.

HTC devices usually come with Security-ON or S-ON, which prevents you from changing the Cellular ID (CID) or Model ID (MID) of your device, flash OTA updates manually and many other things. To put this more simply, if you are the kind of guy who likes to tinker with their phones, you will need Security-OFF or S-OFF. Going S-OFF won’t change anything from the user-perspective, you will still have the stable device you had before and you will get OTAs like before. Also, don’t confuse this with rooting or unlocking your bootloader, those are separate things. For example, my HTC One is S-OFF with locked bootloader and no root. I get official OTAs without any trouble. S-OFF is required when I convert my AT&T HTC One to Google Play Edition or Developer Edition. Follow the following steps to get your device S-OFF.

For some reason, you might want to downgrade your HTC One from Android 4.4.2 to Android 4.3. For example, I updated my AT&T HTC One to Android 4.4.2 with Sense 6.0 by converting it to Developer Edition. After using it for some days, I wanted to revert it back to stock conditions. You might want to do it before returning it to AT&T for warranty or other issues. If you just try to flash a lower version RUU, you will most likely get error message. The problem results from the fact that higher Android firmware from HTC usually comes with a higher version of HBOOT. So, whenever you try to flash an RU.exe, it will show you error as it cannot flash a lower version HBOOT to a device which already has a higher HBOOT version. We need to manually flash a lower version HBOOT first and then use RUU.exe to return to complete stock.

Who doesn’t hate carrier branding of beautiful and powerful devices? Carriers actually cripple the full potentials of the phones/devices and make unnecessary delays in getting software updates. So, if you have a SIM-unlocked AT&T HTC One (or T-Mobile version) outside USA, chances are you are not getting the OS upgrades in time, even not at all. Sure, there are ways to flash the update manually (OTA.zip ir RUU file), but how about turning your phone into the HTC One Developer Edition, which ensures updates directly from HTC and lesser carrier bloats? Moreover, the developer edition is one of the very firsts to get any software updates. There are some extra settings (such as, ability to select GSM/WCDMA/LTE radio) in the developer edition. So lets get our hands dirty and turn our beloved AT&T HTC One into HTC One Developer Edition.